Jan 29 The third-party candidacy of Donald Trump

One of the benefits of having a sinus infection is that in your delirium you sometimes reach a moment of clarity which would otherwise be hard to come by.

By the time you read this, Fox News will have hosted the final GOP candidates' debate before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Of course, there will be one glaring absence: Donald J. Trump (Il Douche to his friends) will have boycotted the debate, due to the unfair questions he's sure Megyn Kelly was going to ask him, with blood coming out of her you know where. He will instead be hosting a counter-event, to which several GOP candidates have committed by donating millions of dollars to charity. (The charity being: The Donald J Trump Foundation.) It will have probably involved the butchering of an oxen or the violation of a pig, but Donnie J Trump is no chump and if the GOP doesn't play by his rules then he'll go over and around them.

And that's the revelation I had.

Since he announced, the unspoken threat—or spoken, as he blatantly has hinted many times—is that if he felt he were being treated "unfairly", he would bolt and run as a 3rd party candidate. That has led to powerbrokers on the Right bending over in the most lascivious manner to keep him onside.

But, as Il Douche has gone from strength to strength, he has realized something: He doesn't need the GOP. Sure, he'll continue to run in its silly primaries; but he's bigger than the party. He doesn't need its strategists, its pollsters, its data. He has become an unstoppable force, one for which whatever remains of the GOP establishment has no answer. Put up a debate moderator he doesn't like? Fine. He'll set up an alternate event, where all the focus will be on him.

In essence, Il Douche is already running as a 3rd party candidate, so beyond any modicum of GOP control as still exists. He's basically using GOP office supplies and "brand", but that's all. He's not running as "Republican businessman Donald J. Trump", but as Alpha-male Supreme. He's his own party, and the remnants of the GOP can follow him or not. It doesn't matter to him. Who could have predicted that a sociopathic narcissist with endless reservoirs of both money and dark charisma would be the viper which bit the GOP in its sclerotic heart and killed it? To steal a metaphor from one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written, Il Douche is the Kwisatz Haderach which GOP geneticists have been breeding for decades. He is the apotheosis of everything hateful and virulent burbling under the surface since the birth of the Southern Strategy. And, like the nonplussed Bene Geserit, the GOP has found that its crowning achievement no longer needs it, and will, in fact, do everything in his power to destroy it.

Il Douche doesn't need to bolt the GOP and run as a 3rd party. He is, in fact, turning the GOP into a 3rd party, a party which will have a decreasing impact on American politics. He speaks to a real resentment; but that resentment doesn't represent a governing electoral coalition. The remnant of sane Republicans, if he's the nominee, will look aghast and run towards the Democrats, or glumly sit at home, seeing their once proud party in the hands of the lumpen proletariat they so often exploited for electoral gain. It is, quite simply, delicious.

Of course, this is life. I'm fully aware that much could go pear-shaped between now and November. Democrats have their own 3rd party viper. Fortunately, he has neither the resources nor charisma of Il Douche.

I'm sure Reince Priebus, in his 3 a.m. night sweats, wonders if he'll be the last chair of the Republican National Committee. Trump seems bent on destroying what's left of the party